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https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-on-not-meeting-nazis-halfway/
From Literary Hub:
Rebecca Solnit: On Not Meeting
Nazis Halfway
Why Is It So Hard for Democrats to Act Like They Actually Won?
November 19, 2020
When Trump won the 2016 election—while losing the popular vote—the New York Times seemed obsessed with running features about what Trump voters were feeling and thinking. These pieces treated them as both an exotic species and people it was our job to understand, understand being that word that means both to comprehend and to grant some sort of indulgence to. Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election, the Los Angeles Times has given their editorial page over to letters from Trump voters, who had exactly the sort of predictable things to say we have been hearing for far more than four years, thanks to the New York Times and what came to seem like about 11,000 other news outlets hanging on the every word of every white supremacist they could convince to go on the record.
The letters editor headed this section with, “In my decade editing this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters.” The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that.
Paul Waldman wrote a valuable column in the Washington Post a few years ago, in which he pointed out that this discord is valuable fuel to right-wing operatives: “The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive.” He notes that the sense of being disrespected “doesn’t come from the policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn’t come from the things Democratic politicians say. Where does it come from? An entire industry that’s devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them. The right has a gigantic media apparatus that is devoted to convincing people that liberals disrespect them, plus a political party whose leaders all understand that that idea is key to their political project and so join in the chorus at every opportunity.”
There’s also often a devil’s bargain buried in all this, that you flatter and, yeah, respect these white people who think this country is theirs by throwing other people under the bus—by disrespecting immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views. And you reinforce that constituency’s sense that they matter more than other people when you pander like this, and pretty much all the problems we’ve faced over the past four years, to say nothing of the last five hundred, come from this sense of white people being more important than nonwhites, Christians than non-Christians, native-born than immigrant, male than female, straight than queer, cis-gender than trans.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just complained that “you can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Now it’s considered bigotry.” This is a standard complaint of the right: the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism, the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress. And of course Alito is disingenuous; you can say that stuff against marriage equality (and he did). Then other people can call you a bigot, because they get to have opinions too, but in his scheme such dissent is intolerable, which is fun coming from a member of the party whose devotees wore “fuck your feelings” shirts at its rallies and popularized the term “snowflake.”
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
I’ve spent much of my adult life watching politicians like Bill Clinton and, at times, Barack Obama sell out their own side to placate the other, with dismal results.
I think our side, if you’ll forgive my ongoing shorthand and binary logic, has something to offer everyone and we can and must win in the long run by offering it, and offering it via better stories and better means to make those stories reach everyone. We actually want to see everyone have a living wage, access to healthcare, and lives unburdened by medical, student, and housing debt. We want this to be a thriving planet when the babies born this year turn 80 in 2100. But the recommended compromise means abandoning and diluting our stories, not fortifying and improving them (and finding ways for them to actually reach the rest of America, rather than having them warped or shut out altogether). I’ve spent much of my adult life watching politicians like Bill Clinton and, at times, Barack Obama sell out their own side to placate the other, with dismal results, and I pray that times have changed enough that Joe Biden will not do it all over again.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
As Rebecca points out, “understanding,” “compromising,” and “engaging in productive dialogue” with the disingenuously disgruntled and “uber angry” far right turns out to be a “one way street” (surprised?). A “fools errand” if you will.
I dealt with transgender youth on a number of occasions during my career on the bench of the Arlington Immigration Court. All of they had suffered severe mental trauma and/or physical mistreatment from peers and adults who should have known better. Most had attempted suicide one or more times.
How is it acceptable for them and their fundamental identities to be “abused” and “dehumanized” by out of control, irresponsible “adults” and “parents” at school board meetings and other events? The GOP should be ashamed for giving in and seeking “political capital” from these reprehensible and cowardly attacks on students, teachers, and public officials trying to do the right thing on accommodating the needs of LBGTQ+ students and African American and other minority students and immigrants whose histories, humanity, and contributions for many generations continuing into the present have not been dealt with honestly, fairly, and humanely by our society. How will appeasing or meeting halfway those peddling lies and hate make things better for future generations?
Just how much “understanding,” “compassion,” “courtesy,” or “compromise” did George Floyd’s family, vulnerable transgender youth, or black students suffering from generations of systemic societal racism and anti gay laws, policies, and social institutions (and “false denial”) get from these folks on the right?
Stunning examples of Dems failures to stand up for their principles, and the disastrous consequences for humanity, are the continuation of Stephen Miller’s grotesque misuse of Title 42 at the border and AG Garland’s failure to clean house and institute common sense reforms at his dysfunctional, anti-immigrant, anti-asylum, anti-due process, intentionally dehumanizing Immigration Courts known as EOIR! His “tolerance” for gross abuses by so-called “courts” that he controls and for the dehumanization and mistreatment of asylum seekers and other migrants on a daily basis is not “compromise” or “understanding!” It’s an ongoing national disgrace!
Did Stephen Miller really win the last election? Garland & Mayorkas are acting like he did!
🇺🇸Due Process Forever!
PWS
11-09-21